Rating Web Pages with PICS
By Lincoln D. Stein
The Web's wide-open spaces are under siege. The Communications Decency Amendment, a portion of the huge Telecommunications Act passed by Congress in February of 1996, banned the transmission of obscene or indecent material across the Web, and made it a crime to place "offensive" material in places where individuals under the age of 18 might find it. Although the amendment is currently in limbo as the federal courts review its constitutionality with respect to the First Amendment, it brings into sharp focus the concern of a large segment of our country's population: that the Internet deprives parents of their right to monitor what their children see and do.
Partly in response to the Communication Decency Amendment's threat of external censorship, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has proposed that the Web do the same thing that the film industry did years ago when it was threatened with censorship: regulate access to Web pages with a self-imposed content-rating system. By attaching content-rating information to Web pages, software can be designed to filter out material that individuals (or their parents) find offensive.
The rating system is called PICS (Platform for Internet Content Selection), and although its primary purpose is to support content-filtering schemes, it's unfair to think of it in only those terms. In actuality, PICS is a general-purpose system for labeling the contents of Web pages according to any number of abstract rating schemes. While one rating scheme might label pages according to violence, nudity, and profanity, another might rate pages by cost for the purposes of a pay-per-view scheme, while a third could attach subject-description terms to pages for use by Web search-and-retrieval software.
